black…MYstory

…sorry…really bad joke.

When I saw this, I mentally filed this under the “1,000,000+ things I should have thought of” category.

Blackbird is a new web browser targeted for the African American web user.  Based on the popular Firefox 3 browser, Blackbird offer tools that help African-Americans locate culturally-specific sites and resources on the web.

Of course, the browser has detractors who label it racist and exclusionary for its targeting of black-centered resources (Editorial comment: Why is it that I only hear these complaints about black-focused content?).  However, as the article states, branded browsers are nothing new:

Indeed, Blackbird’s concept of a browser tailored towards a community is nothing new. The Flock “social browser” (which we’re fans of) offers some appealing integration with social networking and webmail services, and even built-in tools for blogging and photo sharing. A spinoff of Flock, called Gloss, also offers similar custom tools and Blackbird-like content customizations for women. “We call it an ‘identity browser,’” Young explained. “I could make a browser for the lovers of Warcraft. Would that be exclusionary of other people? No, I would just be bringing those people closer to the sites and resources that they are probably interested in.”

In other words, why not?

I, for one, have gotten many emails over the years from people asking about where they can track down African-American-focused content on a variety of subjects but, given my limited reach on the internet, am unable to steer them to a lot.  Perhaps, for those folks, a browser such as Blackbird may fill that need.

I think I might have to download a copy and check it out.  As far as I know, only a Windows version is currently offered (any chance of a Linux version, folks?) but, I’ll try it out anyway.  It sounds promising.

Popularity: 16% [?]

For yet another election cycle, the Democratic National Committee is utilizing the help of bloggers to get the word out.  In this election cycle, the DNC is giving black bloggers a seat at the table.  Well, actually, it’s the card table that the little kids sit at for family dinners.

What black bloggers are finding out is that the “new media” is still as white as the old one and these bloggers are often not on the DNC’s radar.

Thankfully enough, there are black bloggers out there getting organized.  Who knows, maybe soon these bloggers will be able to argue from a position of greater strength so that in the next cycle, the Democrats will have to beat a path to their doors.

Popularity: 13% [?]

If that was a product slogan, would you buy the product? Most likely, not. But, this is what’s happening with electronic voter registration databases across the country.

Allow me to explain. There’s an old adage and, it’s particularly appropriate in the computer world. It goes, “garbage in, garbage out”. In other words, if you feed bad data to a computer, you can’t expect good data to come out. So, to get you what you want, you have to consider other possibilities.

In this case, it’s clear that no one thought that the names or numbers on a person’s voter registration form might not match exactly with their records with Social Security or their state’s department of motor vehicles. As a result, thousands of legal voters are being purged from voter rolls.

Now, I know what some will say. You should always use the same name and contact information on every official document you fill out. Well, yes, but what happens if you hand that document over to someone else and they enter it in with typos and “Michele” gets entered as “Michelle” or “Joseph” gets entered as “Joesph”? Or what if you move to another part of your city and the address on your driver’s license no longer matches your home address?

If you go by these systems, you get purged.

Before anyone says that these aren’t big issues, check out the following:

The databases are only as good as the information fed into them by applicants and election officials. That can lead to human errors as well as variations from state to state. Colorado, for instance, knocked nearly 20% of its voters off the rolls between the 2004 and 2006 elections. Arkansas purged 3%, according to Election Assistance Commission data.

So, it at least one instance, this affected 1 in 5 voters.

With this being a presidential election year, a few thousand votes can matter. To have voters purged, in such great numbers is a recipe for electoral disaster.

Popularity: 21% [?]

If anyone remembers the 2004 presidential elections, you remember the story of the madness that went on in Ohio. Thanks the the scams, shams and dirty tricks of our former secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell, we saw an election stolen. Yeah, I said it.

So, a year after Blackwell is out of the picture (he was trounced when he ran for governor here), we still see that Ohio is vulnerable for a repeat of 2004.

Take a look:

All five voting systems used in Ohio, a state whose electoral votes narrowly swung two elections toward President Bush, have critical flaws that could undermine the integrity of the 2008 general election, a report commissioned by the state’s top elections official has found.

“It was worse than I anticipated,” the official, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, said of the report. “I had hoped that perhaps one system would test superior to the others.”

At polling stations, teams working on the study were able to pick locks to access memory cards and use hand-held devices to plug false vote counts into machines. At boards of election, they were able to introduce malignant software into servers.

Ms. Brunner proposed replacing all of the state’s voting machines, including the touch-screen ones used in more than 50 of Ohio’s 88 counties. She wants all counties to use optical scan machines that read and electronically record paper ballots that are filled in manually by voters.

She called for legislation and financing to be in place by April so the new machines can be used in the presidential election next November. She said she could not estimate the cost of the changes.

Well, let’s see how this works out. Right now, it looks like the game’s still afoot in Ohio.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Surprise…voting machine security still stinks.

A review of the source code for Diebold’s voting machines has uncovered that an attack on single machine could put an entire election at risk.

Why?

Well, according to a University of California Berkeley report, the way in which the voting machines communicate with each other and a central server, on top of flaws in the code, put everything at risk:

“An attack could plausibly be accomplished by a single skilled individual with temporary access to a single voting machine. The damage could be extensive — malicious code could spread to every voting machine in polling places and to county election servers,” it said.

If that’s not bad enough, look at what else the audit uncovered:

The source-code review identified four main weaknesses in Diebold’s software, including: vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to install malware on the machines, a failure to guarantee the secrecy of ballots, a lack of controls to prevent election workers from tampering with ballots and results, and susceptibility to viruses that could allow attackers to an influence an election.

I’m a techie but, I’ll take my chances with paper ballots.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Hot on the heels of the story out of California about the successful hacking of voting machines there comes another one out of Florida.

Two years ago, Florida’s Election Supervisor of Leon County, Ion Sanch0, brought in a computer expert to test the security of the voting machines. This expert, Finnish computer Harri Hursti, was able to hack the machine and not leave a trace that it was done. The hack was dismissed by Florida’s secretary of state and the machine’s manufacturer, Diebold Systems, because it didn’t take place in a “real world” environment.

Today, Florida finds itself having to admit what it knew two years ago, these machines are indeed vulnerable to an untraceable hack.

This comes after hacks done in a research study by Florida State University which yielded similar results:

The study by Florida State University found that, despite recent software fixes, an ”adversary” could use a pre-programmed computer card to swap one candidate’s votes for another or create a “ballot-stuffing attack” that multiplies votes for a candidate or issue.

A Diebold spokesman, Mark Radke, said the company is confident it will upgrade the ”minor” software glitch by an Aug. 17 deadline the state has set. If it doesn’t, Secretary of State Kurt Browning said his office would eventually ban the use of optiscan Diebold machines in Florida, where 25 counties, including Monroe, use its fill-in-the-blank systems.

All other voting vendors are being examined for the same security issues, including Elections Systems & Software machines, which Miami-Dade and Broward use as well. A new state law requires that, by next year, all counties must use paper-trail style machines.

I have said it before and I’ll say it again — I am all for technological advancement but, how it is implemented is often just as, if not more important, than the technology itself. If we can’t rely upon and adequately verify the results of a vote, we are worse-served than hand-counting ballots.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Let’s talk voting today.

Well, it’s been proven, once again, that electronic voting machines, as they exist today, should not be trusted with our votes.

A recent test of voting machine security was conducted in California and most of the electronic voting machines tested failed miserably.

State-sanctioned teams of computer hackers were able to break through the security of virtually every model of California’s voting machines and change results or take control of some of the systems’ electronic functions, according to a University of California study released Friday.

The researchers “were able to bypass physical and software security in every machine they tested,” said Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who authorized the “top to bottom review” of every voting system certified by the state.

Neither Bowen nor the investigators were willing to say exactly how vulnerable California elections are to computer hackers, especially because the team of computer experts from the UC system had top-of-the-line security information plus more time and better access to the voting machines than would-be vote thieves likely would have.

“All information available to the secretary of state was made available to the testers,” including operating manuals, software and source codes usually kept secret by the voting machine companies, said Matt Bishop, UC Davis computer science professor who led the “red team” hacking effort, said in his summary of the results

Despite the team having access to the source code, I still see this as a big issue because in general, a state does not get access to this software so, its IT (information technology) has no way of auditing to determine if a program is working as it should. Therefore, if a hacker was able to alter a program on the voting machine, it would likely not be caught by people at the state level and elections could be altered.

With the 2008 primaries and general elections around the corner, we need a safe, reliable method of voting.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Some of you know how I feel about the whole “stop snitching” thing. It’s used as a means to allow criminals to go on conducting criminal activities in the “hoods” they claim to love. These same fools tell us that it’s selling out black people to have black criminals in jails but, apparently, it’s not selling out black people to kill or sell dope to your brothers and sisters.

Whatever.

Now, a web site along these lines has been launched. Whosarat.com, for a fee, offers subscribers a list of “snitches”. The site uses public records (sentencing documents and plea agreements) to get the names of police informants. This has judges scrambling to get access to this information limited. To date, the site lists som 4,300 informants.

This site is the brainchild of Sean Bucci, a former Boston dj who, himself, is now serving a 12-year sentence for being part of a drug ring. Bucci was convicted due, in part, to the testimony of informants.

My personal take: people are going to get killed because of this site and potential witnesses, who are already reluctant to come forward, will not do so now because their names will be splashed all over the internet. While what Bucci is doing may be legal, it is definitely intimidation and a big help to criminals in our community. Sadly, rather than trying to become a better citizen, Bucci is more interested in providing better tools for criminals.

Popularity: 24% [?]

One component of the “digital divide” is becoming less of a factor. According to a recent Pew study, broadband internet adoption rose by 25% among African Americans. Today, 40% of black adults have broadband access, up from 15% two years ago.

While this is promising, minority and rural residents lag behind in obtaining this sort of access. Groups like the Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA) are pushing for universal broadband access and believe that this study, while showing an increase, still validates the need for investment to provide more universal access and more Americans to take advantage of the content and information available via broadband.

Were getting closer but, we’re not close enough, yet.

Popularity: 14% [?]

A couple of months back, I posted about the White House email scandal. Actually, these are two related scandals. The first was that they were trying to avoid scrutiny by using the Republican National Committee’s email system to conduct official United States business — a big no-no. But, more scandalous was that these emails had supposedly gone missing. The story’s changed since then but, one thing’s clear, millions of official White House email may have been destroyed by the RNC — perhaps, as I believe, purposely. Accidentally or not, destroying these emails is illegal because it violates the Presidential Records Act, which strictly prohibits the destruction of documents and emails regarding official White House business. We already knew that these included emails from people like current White House political director Karl Rove, former chief of staff Andy Card, former White House political director Ken Mehlman and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Now, it has come out that as many as 88 other White House officials were using RNC email accounts to conduct official business and many of these had their emails completely erased from the RNC servers.

CrookAndLiars.com has posted a video of Keith Olbermann’s report on the debacle:

 

 Whites House Email Scandal Grows Bigger: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Popularity: 19% [?]